If you are seeing news around the internet about Google’s services being down (Twitter was especially blown up in the early morning hours with outage hashtags), there are some things you need to know. Mainly, it’s not the first time it has happened, and it won’t be the last. As a matter of fact, an outage of this type happened in mid-November, just about a month ago, and it majorly affected both YouTube and YouTube TV. Today’s outage was a bit more widespread, affecting services like Gmail, Google Assistant, and Google Docs as well.
The outage looks to have started around 6:55am according to Google’s own page for detecting such things. At this site, the list of services affected by the outage also includes things like Google Drive, Hangouts, Chat, Meet and Classroom – all things that are pretty important as workers, students and teachers all hopping back online to resume the weekly grind.
The outage appears to be under control as of about 7:52am, so there are likely less people affected by it than if it were to have happened mid-day. During working hours, a full hour of down time for the majority of Google’s services would be pretty gnarly, but with this happening as most of the East Coast was rising and getting ready, the damage was likely minimal. Keep in mind the West Coast would have been down between the hours of 4am and 5am, so the affect there was even less.
All in all, it looks like a major outage that had a less-than-major affect due simply to the time that it occurred. An hour is a long time for almost all of Google’s core services to be dead in the water, and it only serves as a good reminder of how reliant we are on not just the web, but the services that live there. I’m a huge advocate of the potential and reach of cloud computing, but times like these are a real bummer. I’m glad that for many users out there, you simply got to sleep right through this one.
